Author: Pat Ganahl

Most companies call it Research and Development. Here at Banks, we call it the Race Shop. I think of it as the toy room.

But calling it the Race Shop is not a bit far-fetched. This shop has not only turned out several true-blood race cars, but it has also produced several world record holders. That is a pregnant statement. The emphasis, here, is on several.

Well, here’s one for you Dodge boys (and girls). Specifically, I’m talking about the members of Turbo Diesel Register, otherwise known as TDR.

The TDR is actually based on a quarterly publication that started in 1993 with a stated purpose to be “an open forum for the exchange of information from the manufacturers to the owners,” and “to give Dodge diesel owners more satisfaction in the ownership of their truck.”

A couple of weeks ago, when I showed you all the different departments of employees here at Banks Engineering (at the Christmas party), I said I’d tell you more about the Install group in a week or two. Well, make it two.

I guess it should technically be called the Banks Factory Installation Center, but all of us here refer to it simply as Install.

You can tell by the date of this column that Christmas was the day before yesterday. Last Friday, after I posted the Friday Night News, we held our big Banks Christmas party. And the emphasis—and this week’s news—is on BIG! My job was to take pictures with our digital camera of each department of Banks employees as they were called up on stage. I’ll post them here so you can see just how big we are. I’m talking number of individuals, not individual size of employees.

Chad Horning is a videographer who accompanied us to Bonneville for the recent running of the Sidewinder pickup to capture all the record-smashing action, including shots from an airplane as the truck sped down the course. If you live in the Los Angeles area and watch the 5 o’clock news, you saw some of his footage in the last couple of weeks as several TV channels reported on The World’s Fastest Pickup. And, as I reported here on 11/15/02, you can sample several clips of his video work on our Sidewinder web site.

It’s called an acronym. In this case it stands for Computerized Brake Controller. And it’s a patent-pending Banks exclusive that is now an integral part of our Banks Brakes. Other diesel exhaust brakes are controlled by a micro-switch, which is a simple on-off device just like a light switch at home.

At least one magazine calls them Pro Tourers: a new kind of hot rod with big wheels, very low-profile tires, big brakes, super-tuned chassis, a 5 or 6 speed manual trans, and plenty of horsepower. In other words, a hot rod that drives in something other than a straight line and for distances longer than a quarter mile—much longer.

At close to 500 cubic inches, the GM 8.1L Vortec in the Workhorse chassis is already the most powerful gasoline motorhome going. So how did the Banks engineers figure out how to get 22% more power out of it? That’s 66 more horsepower and 77 more lb.-ft. of torque. They did it the way we always do—by building prototypes and testing them exhaustively to see what really works best in the real world.

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